I want to control the overall volume of separate drum tracks. How?

[tdehan]

I have a project I've been working on where the drums are all on separate tracks.  I would like the ability to control the overall drum volume without having to adjust the slider on each separate drum track.  How can I achieve this?

Thanks!

[DeeringAmps]

Send Route them all to a buss. (thanks to @David Baay for pointing out what I really meant) I name mine DRUMS.
Or, you can send or route them all to an alt track. (I send all my drums to an alt track, where I use IKM's Sunset Stuidos
to create a "virtual" drum room).

HTH,

t

Edited 5 hours ago by DeeringAmps

[tdehan]

Yes, I thought about sending them all to a single buss but then I have the volume on each track plus the buss volume.  Is there a way to only get the volume from just the buss?

[Sal Sorice]

Instead of using a Send, make the Output of each drum track the Drum Bus.

[Amberwolf]

1 hour ago, tdehan said:

I have a project I've been working on where the drums are all on separate tracks.  I would like the ability to control the overall drum volume without having to adjust the slider on each separate drum track.  How can I achieve this?

The "best" way to do this is to create a bus just for all of those to output to.  That bus then goes to your master bus, that then goes to your hardware output. 

That allows you to not only have a single final volume, trim, etc for them, but also to have any global effects you may want on the whole thing (like a final multiband compressor, limiter, room-shaping-reverb, etc).

(I usually end up using the controls in the multiband itself as the overall contrrol for that group of percussion, but I also usualy have more than one percussion bus, one for each kind--like a regular kit, a bunch of hand percussion, effects percussion, and then a bus to merge all those together, and then a further bus that merges bass and percussion and sends it all onto the master bus.  You can hear how that all sounds in my projects at http://amberwolf.bandcamp.com; I started using that full process somewhere around The Tomorrow Option, IIRC, before that it was just the one drum buss and the bass buss feeding the perc-bass feeding the master).  

 

If you really don't want that, then you can group all the volume controls so they all move at the same time, either as a quick group or a named permanent one.   But if you have automated them, that may not work as expected. 

In that case you can switch to Offset Mode which gives you access to the static non-automated volume controls, and group those and move them together.

[Amberwolf]

1 hour ago, tdehan said:

Yes, I thought about sending them all to a single buss but then I have the volume on each track plus the buss volume.  Is there a way to only get the volume from just the buss?

Not sure what you mean by that.

If you mean only have the bus volume control anything, you'd simply leave all the individual track volumes at the default, and not automate them either. 

If you mean just have a volume control by itself, no--the bus has the controls it has; you just don't use any of the ones you don't want to, and just use it's volume.  

If you mean something else you'll have to be specific. 

[Chaps]

1 hour ago, tdehan said:

Yes, I thought about sending them all to a single buss but then I have the volume on each track plus the buss volume.  Is there a way to only get the volume from just the buss?

Output an audio track to a bus. Mute the bus. Do you still hear the track's audio?

[tdehan]

Thanks for all the responses.  I now have a number of things to try.  I will let you know how it goes.

Again, thanks!

[tdehan]

I created a Stereo Bus but don't see how to Output each of the drum tracks to that bus.  What am I missing

[David Baay]

1 hour ago, Sal Sorice said:

Instead of using a Send, make the Output of each drum track the Drum Bus.

Yes, I’m sure this is what DeeringAmps meant when he wrote ‘send’. Try this first; it’s the conventional approach.

[David Baay]

2 minutes ago, tdehan said:

I created a Stereo Bus but don't see how to Output each of the drum tracks to that bus.  What am I missing

Show all track controls, select all drum tracks and hold Ctrl while changing the Output of one - or use the Output control in the Track Inspector. This assumes they are either audio tracks or Synth/Instrument tracks, of course.

[tdehan]

The drums are all TTS-1.  There is no option to OUTPUT to the new Stereo Bus or SEND.  So, what I ended up doing was to BOUNCE all the separate drum tracks to one track and adjusted the overall volume that way.

[David Baay]

TTS1 has 4 stereo outs that can be used as 8 mono outs with instrument channels panned hard left and right, but it’s not possible to separate drums. When you have multiple MIDI tracks driving TTS1’s drum channel, the MIDI Volume level of the last one will override the rest. The only way to mix kit piece levels in TTS1 is using MIDI ‘Gain’ which is actually Velocity Offset.

[Amberwolf]

Generally, if all your drums (or other sounds) come from the same instance of the same synth, then your volume control *is* the synth's volume control, or the track that it is on.  

 

If your drums (or other sounds) come from separate instances of the same synth, then you can do what we suggested.

 

For synths like TTS-1, DR-008, etc., with multiple audio outs, then you can set up multiple audio tracks that have the synth's separate audio outputs on them.  Then set the outputs of those tracks to a single bus.

But TTS-1 (IIRC) only lets you output the drum sounds on one single audio output, so you *already* have them all on a single volume control, for a single instance. 

 

If you have TTS-1, you probably also have Session Drummer of one version or another. 

This one supports an audio output for every separate drum (at least 8, IIRC), so you can effect / mix each separately in separate tracks, then bus those all down to one as suggested. 

 

 

39 minutes ago, tdehan said:

The drums are all TTS-1.  There is no option to OUTPUT to the new Stereo Bus or SEND.  

The track the TTS-1 is in has an output selection.  That is where you choose where it's output goes (not in the TTS-1). 

 

Edited yesterday at 06:55 PM by Amberwolf

[Amberwolf]

11 minutes ago, David Baay said:

The only way to mix kit piece levels in TTS1 is using MIDI ‘Gain’ which is actually Velocity Offset.

And doing this can affect how the drums sound, or even which drum sound is actually used, with some synths. I have not used TTS-1 in a very long time so don't recall if it uses different samples for different velocities, but if it does, stuff can sound very different using the midi gain or vel+ offsets to mix with.

[Chaps]

1 hour ago, tdehan said:

The drums are all TTS-1.  There is no option to OUTPUT to the new Stereo Bus or SEND.  So, what I ended up doing was to BOUNCE all the separate drum tracks to one track and adjusted the overall volume that way.

The TTS-1 is a different animal and was created in simpler times. It sounds like what you want is a multitimbral drum synth with more audio outputs. I'm not very familiar with free drum synths since I almost exclusivity XLN Addictive Drums 2, which will do exactly what you want to do, as will many other drums synths you have to pay for in some way or another. Three FREE drum synths I have used that can have multiple audio outputs are IK Multimedia MODO Drum CS (16 Stereo Audio Tracks), MT-Power Drum Kit 2 (8 Stereo Audio Tracks), and Steven Slate Drums 5.5 (24 Stereo Audio Tracks). All three are popular with great sounds but are also much more complex than the TTS-1. If you want to go that route, and have the free hard drive space, I suggest trying all three to see which one best serves your needs. All three will do what you want, and a whole lot more.

IK Multimedia Free Software

MT Power Drum Kit 2

Steven Slate SSD 5.5

[Sock Monkey]

Go back and read the OP. 
It would imply the user is possibly using a multi output VST drum kit.  but!! 
Then we find out it is the TTS-1. Which is sort of multi out but the drum channel is normally just a stereo output which can only be assigned to 1 stereo output. 
The op is ( I think) is  using multiple midi tracks to feed the TTS-1 drums. But this was not clear due to the lack of clarity in the op. 
 

So the answer to the question might be as simple as you use the Channel 10 fader of the TTS-1. 
Each of those tracks are possibly all Ch10.   changing any of the tracks will result in the sending of multiple cc7 events on CH 10  so best man wins.  

Unless the op is using all 16 TTS1 channels as a drum kit?? I guess that’s a weird way to do things but you could have say the drum kit assigned to all 16 channels and each midi track set as such! Channel 1 kick, Channel 2 snare and so forth! 
Then the answer is to use the instrument tracks volume as the master . That seems way too obvious so not sure. 

As usual more information is needed to actually understand what is happening. 
 

Questions. 
Are the multiple tracks midi or the 4 audio tracks that the TTS-1 is capable of using. 
Are you only using channel 10 of the TTS-1 ? or more? 
Is the TTS /1 installed as a simple instrument track or. Split? 
S it set up to use all 4 channels?  

[David Baay]

10 hours ago, Sock Monkey said:

Unless the op is using all 16 TTS1 channels as a drum kit

I had the same thought, but don’t think it’s possible; drums are strictly channel 10 for GM compatibility.

[Sock Monkey]

@David Baay
 

The drums and percussion are a Bank. You choose the bank and the different kits are available for all channels.
 

I no longer have the TTS-1 as I have excluded it but for sure I have done this in the past and loaded percussion or the different kits into channels 11 and 12 to double up on sounds. A common technique for beefing up lame GM patches. 

[David Baay]

Interesting, but doubtful the OP went that deep. I had hardware synths with GM modes that sounded better so never used It that much.

[User 905133]

 

2 hours ago, David Baay said:

I . . . don’t think it’s possible; drums are strictly channel 10 for GM compatibility.

1 hour ago, Sock Monkey said:

The drums and percussion are a Bank. You choose the bank and the different kits are available for all channels . . .

I no longer have the TTS-1 as I have excluded it but for sure I have done this in the past and loaded percussion or the different kits into channels 11 and 12 to double up on sounds. A common technique for beefing up lame GM patches. 

Interesting.  With my Roland M-GS64s (which have much in common with the TTS-1), I used to set two adjacent channels (10 and 11 IIRC) to Drum Maps for the same purpose. I can't remember if I tried this strategy with TTS-1.  I'll have to make some time to try it.